Under the impact of the worldwide economic crisis, a new wave of struggles broke out in Asia in 1974. No country remained insulated, but the effects of the crisis could be seen most dramatically in the semicolonial countries. Already ground down to a subsistence level by imperialism, the workers and peasants there have been hardest hit.
For millions in Asia the spiraling inflation and developing recession meant not merely hardship but starvation. Famine on a massive scale threatens whole populations. On the Indian subcontinent hundreds are already dying each day.
Famine on a Continental Scale
Food riots, demonstrations, and strikes against rising prices and the government’s inability to provide an adequate system of food distribution spread from one Indian state to another throughout 1974. Workers in Bombay and the rest of Maharashtra state held a twenty-four-hour general strike January 2 to protest the inflation that had sent prices of fuel and basic foodstuffs soaring by more than 20% in six months. It was the biggest such action ever held there; the whole state was paralyzed.
At the beginning of the year agitation throughout Gujarat over several months led to the overthrow of the state government. Begun by student protests over hikes in meal prices, it quickly developed into a mass movement demanding more food, lower prices, and an end to government corruption. The police, the paramilitary Border Security Force, and eventually the army were sent in, killing more than eighty-five demonstrators.
A statewide general strike in Bihar on January 21 was followed by massive student protests in March in which eighty persons were killed. About 500,000 demonstrators rallied in the state capital of Patna on June 5 and demanded the dissolution of the state assembly and the dismissal of the corrupt Abdul Ghafoor Ministry. All the machinery of government ground to a halt. Everything, that is, except the repressive apparatus. One of the regime’s few remaining props was the pro-Moscow Communist party of India, which charged that the actions were motivated by “reactionary trends.” In October, the state was paralyzed by a three-day general strike.
In May the longest national rail strike in the country’s history, lasting twenty days, was broken only after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi arrested between 30,000 and 50,000 railway workers. A reign of terror was unleashed against workers and their families. In protest of the arrests, one-day general strikes shut down Bombay, New Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras.
The regime responded to this rising level of struggle with brutal repression. Tens of thousands of political prisoners were reported to be in Gandhi’s jails. “What is happening in Uttar Pradesh, in Bihar and in other parts of the country,” a Washington Post correspondent reported, “is that bitter, dissatisfied, hungry, unemployed, frustrated Indians are beginning to realize that they might be able to win in the streets what they cannot gain at the polls.”
If anything, the famine in Bangladesh was even worse than in India. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s regime reacted with brutal repression. When the major opposition party called a one-day general strike in protest, completely shutting down the country on January 20, the government rushed in a Special Powers Act giving it greatly expanded powers. The opposition continued to organize large rallies and demonstrations in the face of repeated violence from the regime. More than 12,000 political prisoners are now in Mujib’s jails.
Sri Lanka has also been a victim of the worldwide economic crisis, and its government has cut rice and flour rations. The popular-front regime still holds without trial about 6,000 political prisoners jailed after the 1971 crackdown on the young rebels of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP – People’s Liberation Front).
Inflation has hit harder in Japan than in most other capitalist countries. At the beginning of the year wholesale prices were up 35.4% over the previous year and consumer prices, 26%, while profits had risen an estimated 80%. Worker militancy increased.
“Japanese businessmen are jittery these days, and with good reason,” reported the March 9 Business Week. “This year’s shunto – the annual spring campaign for higher wages by labor unions – is developing into the most shattering collision between labor and management in Japan’s post-World War II history.”
The forecast proved correct. Government employees staged a massive walkout March 1, together with transportation and private-industry workers. This first round of the spring offensive involved more than half a million workers. In the second round, on March 26, 2.4 million workers went on strike. After a three-day general strike that began on April 10 and involved an estimated 6.3 million workers – the largest strike in Japanese history – workers won wage increases averaging 30%.
Revelations of the existence of a secret pact allowing Washington to transport nuclear arms on Japanese territory touched off huge protest rallies throughout Japan on October 21. More than two million persons took part in demonstrations demanding the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons and the cancellation of President Ford’s scheduled November visit. The furor over nuclear weapons and the growing discontent over Japan’s economic problems were capped by disclosures about Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s shady financial dealings, forcing him to resign. But not before the visit of Ford, who was met by angry demonstrations and was guarded by tens of thousands of police.
As the head of the major imperialist power in Asia, Tanaka ran into a reception similar to Ford’s when he toured five Southeast Asian countries in January. In Jakarta tens of thousands of students and young people protested Tokyo’s economic domination of Indonesia. In the clashes with Suharto’s troops that followed, ten persons were killed, more than 100 were wounded, and about 170 were arrested.
In the largest demonstrations since the overthrow of the military regime in October 1973, 5,000 Thai students turned out to protest Tanaka’s visit to Thailand. They demanded an end to Japanese economic penetration of the country and an end to CIA activity in Thailand.
About 70,000 workers in Thailand’s textile works – the largest manufacturing industry in the country – staged a week-long strike in June and won an increase in the minimum wage. It was the largest labor action since the illegal strikes in May 1973 under the old military dictatorship.
Hong Kong, facing a rise in the cost of living of 18% in the first three months of 1974 alone and with about 10% of the labor force laid off, witnessed the first public protest meeting by workers since the upsurge in 1967 was defeated. About 3,000 workers turned out for a rally protesting inflation May 5, in spite of opposition from the Maoist trade-union bureaucrats. The sponsors of the rally were mainly students and young workers.
Food shortages, unemployment, and inflation set off protests in Burma as well. In May, dockers at Akyab refused to load rice for export, saying it was needed to feed people at home. Strikes and sit-ins took place in many cities. In Rangoon, workers at the railway engine workshops struck June 3, setting off strikes at other factories. They held the negotiating team from the government and from the bosses hostage until twenty-three arrested strike leaders were released. Twenty-seven persons were reported to have been killed when troops attacked some of the factories on strike.
In Australia and New Zealand, with economies hit hard by inflation and heading toward recessions, the Labor governments have attempted to impose wage controls in one guise or another while allowing the capitalists to reap record profits.
Unemployment in Australia is now at 3.6 percent, the highest level since the Depression of the 1930s, and the real rise in the cost of living was more than 20 percent this year. Australian workers reacted with increasing militancy – by the first eight months of the year a record number of workdays had been lost by strikes. In Western Australia, when dictatorial antiunion laws were introduced by the conservative state government, 100,000 workers protested with militant demonstrations and a one-day general strike.
Tens of thousands of New Zealand workers went out on strikes and protest marches in July when the Labor government jailed Bill Andersen, secretary of the Northern Drivers Union.
In both Australia and New Zealand, large demonstrations were held in support of the right to abortion.
National Liberation Struggles
Nearly two years after the Vietnam accords were signed in Paris in January 1973, the war continues. By June of 1974 more than 185,000 persons had been killed or wounded since the “cease-fire,” and an estimated 200,000 political prisoners were being held in Thieu’s jails.
Since Washington was compelled to withdraw its ground troops from Vietnam, it is now relying more on airpower from secure bases off the shores of Asia. The base on Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean has been built up, and the Pentagon is planning a similar facility on the Pacific island of Tinian, near Guam.
Responding to repeated land-grabbing operations by the Saigon regime, military action by the Provisional Revolutionary Government forced Thieu to vacate many of the outposts he had set up in PRG territory.
In the Saigon-controlled areas, a new opposition emerged to challenge Thieu. The People’s Anticorruption Movement to Save the Country and Restore Peace began in Hue in September as a campaign by Catholics against the corruption of the regime, but it soon addressed broader issues. As demonstrations spread to Danang, Saigon, and other areas, the Catholics were joined by journalists, lawyers, and the main veterans organization. Important Buddhist groups added their weight to the campaign, and a new opposition group, the National Reconciliation Force, was set up. The demand for Thieu’s ouster became the focus of the campaign.
At first Thieu tried phony concessions and removed four of his cabinet ministers. That failed to satisfy his critics. “The people demand peace and reconciliation, not a cabinet reshuffle,” said Senator Vu Van Mau, a leader of the National Reconciliation Force. When the dismissal of 377 lower-ranking army officers and the transfer of three corps commanders failed to halt the campaign, Thieu reverted to repression.
In Cambodia, student protests erupted in Pnompenh during May and June, and two demonstrators and two government officials were killed when riot police attacked a school occupied by students. They were protesting the new draft law, high inflation, and government corruption.
A third Laotian coalition government was formed on April 5. In November, the southern capital of Pakse was brought to a standstill by student demonstrators who occupied a key bridge in the center of the city for more than a week. The military commander of the region declined to intervene: “One must be careful with students,” he said. “Do not expect me to send troops to shoot at them; I do not intend to end up like the ousted Thai trio.”
But that was the exception. Throughout Asia, the dictatorial regimes supported by imperialism resorted more and more to naked repression.
South Korea’s President Park Chung Hee attempted to wipe out opposition to his dictatorship. In January and April he issued four “emergency” decrees, banning all discussion and criticism of the constitution and prohibiting dissent against the government and its policies. The decrees carried penalties ranging from imprisonment to death, established secret courts-martial, and permitted arrests without warrant. At least 171 persons were convicted under the decrees, including prominent intellectuals, poets, writers, student leaders, politicians, and members of the clergy. Many were tortured.
After an attempt on his life August 15 in which his wife was killed, Park lifted two of the decrees. Large protests again occurred, however, particularly in the weeks preceding Ford’s November 22 visit. The Catholics and students were joined by journalists, who struck in protest over a censorship decree that banned reports on the opposition protests. In October, Park shut down half of South Korea’s universities.
In the Philippines, after Muslim rebels took control of the city of Jolo on February 7, President Marcos’s armed forces leveled the city with napalm, bombs, and indiscriminate shelling. Civilian casualties were estimated by the Muslims at 3,000. On the other side of the continent. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan was waging a similar war of terror against the rebelling Baluchi people. It was reported that 800 persons had been killed in bombing raids in Baluchistan during one week in June. The beginnings of struggles for national self-determination were seen in Timor and New Caledonia also.
In Papua New Guinea the date for formal “independence” from Australian imperialism was pushed back to sometime “in the first half of 1975.” Separatist movements became more vocal, with Papuan House of Assembly member Josephine Abaijah leading a militant inflation protest of 2,500 women in Port Moresby in June.
Most of the struggles that have erupted throughout Asia in the past year have done so despite the efforts of the pro-Moscow and pro-Peking Communist parties. The Communist parties following Moscow’s lead have attempted to defuse struggle after struggle, as in India, where the CPI put itself in open alliance with Gandhi’s Congress party. The Maoist leaderships have played a similar role.
Peking’s diplomatic courtship of bourgeois regimes has continued at the expense of the interests of the revolution in Asia. The Thai defense minister returned from a trip to Peking in February boasting, as the New York Times reported, “that China had stopped supporting insurgents in Thailand, Laos and other Southeast Asian countries.”
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdul Razak returned from a similar trip and said in Kuala Lumpur June 2 that the Chinese had assured him they would not interfere in his drive against the pro-Peking Malaysian rebels. The insurgents were an internal Malaysian problem ‘for us to deal with as we think best,” Razak said he was told. He ordered the rebels to surrender.
China itself was caught up in a massive campaign to “criticize Lin Piao and Confucius.” The Maoists’ main targets appeared to be the leaders in the upper ranks of the army who might still harbor some sympathies for the deposed Lin, and the millions of rebel youth and intellectuals deported to the countryside at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
After it seemed that the anti-Lin, anti-Confucius campaign might be getting out of the hands of the Maoist leadership and disrupting the economic life of the country, the bureaucracy redirected it toward an emphasis on production.
But in spite of the betrayals of the Maoist leadership, the tremendous gains made possible by a nationalized planned economy stand in vivid contrast to the mass starvation in India and Bangladesh.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1247.pdf#page=13&view=FitV,3